“You never really understand another person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

[Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird]

The term empathy refers to sensitivity and understanding of the mental states of others. We can put ourselves in other people's shoes, see things from their point of view.

Nursing scholar Theresa Wiseman calls out four attributes or four qualities to empathy— 1./ To be able to see the world as others see it; 2./To be nonjudgmental; 3./ To understand another person’s feelings; 4./ To communicate our understanding of that person’s feelings.

But the term empathy has been used to refer to two distinct, yet related human abilities — mental perspective taking and the vicarious sharing of emotion. Scientists call the first cognitive empathy and the second emotional empathy.

The evolution of cognitive empathy may be due to its ability to enhance social functioning so we can respond to the demands of a complex social environment. It enables us to understand and predict the behavior of others, and helps facilitate conversation and social expertise.

Emotional empathy motivates us to behave altruistically towards others. Scientists have also found that this kind of empathy may be determinant in moral development, and that it appears to provide the fundamental basis for parent-child bonding and group cohesion.

Empathy is the better half to our self-interested nature. Over the last decade neuroscientists have discovered that 98% of us have empathy wired into our brains. We are wired for social connection, empathy is at the core of who we are. It is high among the skills we need to thrive in the 21st Century.

Making better habits through curiosity

As with many other areas in our lives where we wish to improve our lot, we can do better by making it a habit. There are three simple things we can do to exercise our emphatic nature.

We can involve our emphatic tendency through listening. When we hold back from talking and we let the other person tell us what is on their mind without interruptions, we practice “radical listening.” This form of listening is important to resolving conflict situations, for example.

Thinking about the person behind things is also a good prompt. For example, a few years ago, NPR took a look at the life cycle of a T-shirt —from the people who cultivate the cotton, to those who transport it, and the people who make it. And we can extend our awareness to include us potentially owning the item, and who we pass it on to, if we do.

Talking and connecting with strangers can help us challenge our assumptions. This is something that happens regularly in Italy and other parts of Europe, for example. We often take cues from our environment and situation to assess and catalogue people quickly—without a second thought.

We could be totally off base and never know about it. Famous violinist Josh Bell put that principle to the test a few years ago. He stood near a trash can in the Metro Station in Washington D.C. and played to the morning subway riders. One woman toward the end stopped and talked with him because she had seen Bell play at the Library of Congress and knew who he was#. Everyone else just rushed by.

“radical listening”

thinking about the human behind things

talking with strangers

We can use curiosity to break bad habits and move to more productive ones. Children are naturally more inquisitive and engaged with reality because they are learning all the time.

How cognitive empathy works in tandem with reason

In Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It British writer Roman Krznaric provides historical examples of the role of empathy in making society better. In talking about the British evacuation during WWII he says:

From 1939 to 1944, between one and two million children were evacuated from major cities and towns to more rural areas to escape the German bombs. As every schoolchild learns, rather than being placed in camps, they were mostly accommodated in private homes, many staying with their foster families for several years.

[...]

for the first time, relatively well-off rural householders were exposed to the realities of urban poverty.

Suddenly hundreds of thousands of homes in small towns and villages were filled with scrawny children from the slums of London, Liverpool and other urban centers, who were often malnourished, suffering from rickets and lice, and lacking shoes or decent underwear.

[...]

Evacuation produced an unprecedented explosion of mass emphatic understanding, by enabling rural people to step into the lives of the urban poor.

[...]

The response was a remarkable wave of public action. Letters were written to the Times, organizations such as the National Federation of Women’s Institutes lobbied for new child health policy, and members of parliament called for reform. Even more extraordinary was that the government responded almost immediately with a far-reaching expansion of child welfare provisions, which was all the more striking for taking place in a period of wartime austerity and resource constraint.

The standard of school meals was raised and cheap milk and vitamins were made available for children and expectant mothers. Throughout the early 1940s new legislation was introduced to ensure improved public health, nutrition and education for children, reversing decades of inadequate social care rooted in the Poor Laws of the nineteenth century. Most of these policy changes were made permanent after the end of the war.

Empathy is an extraordinary tool for social change as well as to improve our lives. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, psychologist Steven Pinker says that an “expansion of empathy,” along with self-control, our moral sense, and reason, is responsible for the decline in violence we have experienced over long stretches of history.

The counter-empathy intellectual current says reason is a better tool. But we have ample daily examples of how attention-getting emotional tools like persuasion and its close companion on the spectrum, manipulation can be and are. But they leverage the emotional kind of empathy, and not the cognitive kind.

Plus, as Jamil Zaki, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Stanford University says, we are converging two narratives of empathy— that it is automatic, and that it “diminishes and expands with features of your situation.”

“How can we square these two accounts?” We can do it by abandoning some of the underlying assumptions. Zaki says:

Lately, I've begun thinking about empathy not as something that happens to us, but rather as a choice that we make, even if we're not aware we're making it. We often make an implicit or explicit decision as to whether we want to engage with someone's emotions or not, based on the motives we might have for doing so.

“Empathy is expensive,” says Zaki. It's not just the economic cost, but the moral implications of where our responsibilities are. But not difficult to learn, if we so choose.

Krznaric says we can boost our empathy and use it to improve our relationships, enhance our creativity, and rethink our priorities in life. We can also learn to employ it in tackling social problems —from everyday prejudice to violent conflicts.

In Empathy he identifies numerous tools to deploy to increase empathy — bringing babies to classrooms; joining a choir; considering the full potential life cycle of the clothes we wear; talking with strangers; and immersing ourselves in the role of somebody else for some time, as George Orwell did in Down and Out in Paris and London:

“It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious attitude that society takes towards them. People seem to feel that there is some essential difference between beggars and ordinary 'working' men. They are a race apart—outcasts, like criminals and prostitutes.

Working men 'work', beggars do not 'work'; they are parasites, worthless in their very nature. It is taken for granted that a beggar does not 'earn' his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic 'earns' his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no ESSENTIAL difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is WORK? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course—but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless.

And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a hire-purchase tout—in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite.

He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideas, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? —for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living.

In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modem talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'?

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately.

A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.”

Roland Barthes says, “Literature is the question minus the answer,” and it can expand our horizons, help us ask better questions. For example, “what's on your mind?” is a better question because it's open-ended and invites choosing what and how much to say.

Reading books, looking at photographs and watching films can also help build empathy because it opens the door to other people's experiences. Seeing empathy and emotion as children see it is eye opening. We can relearn the value of empathy and its role in helping us understand ourselves and, through connection, others, who may become less “other” and more “us.”

On the film's side, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly by director Julian Schnabel is a beautiful story. From the book by Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby who suffers a stroke and has to live with an almost totally paralyzed body; only his left eye isn't paralyzed.

We tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes us better people. The reality is eye opening and much more nuanced. Something the sensitive people among us would fully appreciate. For example, peer pressure is not only unpleasant, but can actually change our view of a problem and make us utterly blind to the issues. A fantastic, well researched, and valuable book.

The book provides good advice that is applicable to our work as presenters. Whether we are pros or novices, or anywhere in between, each one of us has a story to tell. Maybe we present for work, or maybe we just enjoy saying a word at family functions. Our aim remains the same —we want to make a connection. Learning to find the universal in us is a sustainable path to telling a story that works. In Carter's words —we become the message.

The English translation by Grace Frick was highly recommended. The book was written as a testamentary letter from the emperor Hadrian to his successor, the younger Marcus Aurelius. It is the sort of life-teaching experience worth discussing between generations. Yourcenar reimagines the emperor's difficult upbringing, his triumphs and reversals, and his work of reordering a world torn by war as emperor. It's like reading the classics, and a classic itself.

From learning that we are most effective when we have high testosterone and low cortisol to how decisions create confidence and behavior creates thoughts, this book is filled with counter intuitive and evidence-based information that our bodies change our mind.

What makes Jenny's work remarkable is her background and experience. She combines technology with business savvy and an understanding of training and development techniques to help others learn. Her motto, "if change is the only constant, let's get better at it" is apt; her belief that careers are not linear a much-needed message.

It describes the mental filters or meta programs we employ in communication in practical contexts. For example, what questions to use to elicit a person's position, how to identify what meta program positions are best suited to a given job, how to frame a job or product ad so that it speaks to the audience it is intended for.

It provides an honest, historical account of the scientist's life and work. The book was written from the review of letters to and from Madame Curie to many people, the memories of people that knew her, drawing from her lectures and speeches, and the memories of Eve and her other daughter Irene, herself a scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

I've been fascinated by how the brain works since my days working in early neurological development. Such a small organ enclosed in a fixed box, yet capable of amazing feats. Rock asks powerful questions: Why does our brain work better in certain circumstances vs. others? What are the limitations of our cognitive abilities? How do we make it better?

The book was recommended by a friend and it did not disappoint. A panoramic joining East and West, the world of clowns, jesters and fools, from Rumi, Gautama the Buddha, Mark Twain, Lao Tzu, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Allen Ginsberg, and Lily Tomlin and many more. Just what we need to put our problems and life into perspective. For those who enjoy humorous examinations of our many follies and do not take themselves too seriously.

Focuses on the common errors we make when trying to comprehend the world around us, and form opinions. We can learn to evaluate the information presented to us better, and we should. Examples include how we try to make order out of chaos, even when there is no order, how we filter what we hear according to our biases, and how wishful thinking can distort reality.

Dan Pink has spent the past two decades trying to understand how people work, how organizations function and in particular how we can use social science —psychology, economics, linguistics, etc.— to do things a little better.

In his 2016 Commencement Address at Georgetown, Pink shares one piece of research to help soon-to-be graduates learn one important lesson. To keep with the experiential learning nature of education at Georgetown, he recreates the experiment during his (often humorous) talk.

The instructions, which we can also look to replicate on our own, are:

identify our dominant hand

with it, snap our fingers five times very quickly

using the forefinger of our dominant hand on our own forehead draw a capital “E”

He cautions everyone in the audience to follow the instructions, rather than overthink them. Since the 1980's social psychologists have been using this experiment to measure perspective-taking —the ability to get out of our own head, and see things from someone else's point of view.

Pink says, when we don't know what's being measured, this is a way to find out what's our instinct. Do we draw the letter so someone else could read it? Or do we draw it to make it easier for us to read it? Which is our default? Do we take our own perspective, or do we take someone else's?

There is no value judgement in the question. Because what really matters is context: power.

When people have power, do you think they are more inclined to take their own perspective, or someone else's perspective?

Usually not even close.

Research shows that when you remind people of their achievements, when you ask them to describe a time when they have authority over somebody, they become much more likely to draw the “E” in the self-oriented way.

As some of these researchers explain, “power leads individuals to anchor to heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to other's perspectives.”

Here's the key — in general, not all the time, there is an inverse relationship between feelings of power and perspective-taking. The more powerful one feels, the worse, typically, their perspective-taking abilities become. High-status people, in organizations and society are typically not good perspective-taking people. The low-status people, they're usually great at it; they're not in control.

To survive, it sure helps to know what the people who are in control are thinking.

An important lesson to remember as we make our way into the world making decisions of consequence. When we are in positions of power, we may not have the time nor the luxury to shift perspectives. And yet, we should be careful, says Pink:

Power can be a heady brew.

[...]

if you gradually lose the ability to see the world through someone else's eyes, all the experience and expertise you have accumulated will melt into a puddle of unrealized potential.

But if you work to balance power and perspective-taking (you'll have to work at that, it won't come automatically), you'll become a more effective leader because you will offer reasons beyond “I said so” for why anybody should follow you.

You'll become a more skilled negotiator because you'll understand all the positions around the table. You'll become a wiser decision-maker because your judgement will be informed by a wider set of views.

But perhaps more than anything, you could avoid what could be the biggest mistake that bosses, teachers, executives, government officials, and anyone else in a position of power can make.

It's a mistake at some point or another we have all made:

Thinking you are the smartest person in the room.

[...]

If you think you are the smartest person in the room, you just proved that you're not. Believing you are the smartest person in the room never ends well. It's how companies crumble, example Enron. It's how governments make tragic mistakes, example the U.S. in Vietnam. And it's how otherwise capable people undermine their achievements and limit their contributions. Example, you might be thinking of someone right now.

Believing you are the smartest person in the room is especially dangerous today. Why? Because our rooms have gotten a lot smarter.

Referencing the Broadway musical Hamilton, Pink says, “we're bringing more people in the room where it happens.” For example, the Georgetown 2016 graduation class, a much more diverse, and larger group of smart people who should remember to:

Use your power, but sharper the perspective-taking.

Argue like you're right, but listen like you're wrong.

And most of all... try to become the second smartest person in the room.

Culture is a powerful driver of value systems. We absorb the most during our formative years. The currents of thought, ways of doing things, and implicit or explicit rules they produce have enormous influence on how we relate to others and respond to events. Because they involve us at emotional level.

Emotions drive our beliefs, which in turn lead us in how we interpret experiences. For example, a school environment that emphasizes popularity and social performance creates pressure and anxiety in anyone who does not fit the profile naturally. Very few do.

Because it turns out that everyone on the introverted-extroverted spectrum enjoys when others listen to them. When there is less pressure to perform, we are likely more inclined to listen better. Listening well is a prerequisite to connecting.

We rarely talk openly about these kinds of things in school. Most of the time, the pressure is there, and it fills us with anxiety. It, in turn, encourages us to interpret the world irrationally. Which creates mental habits that sometimes become disruptive.

In the Culture of Character, the ideal was serious, disciplined, and honorable. What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as one behaved in private. The word personality didn't exist in English until the eighteenth century, and the idea of “having a good personality was not widespread until the twentieth.”

But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and entertaining. “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was that of the performer,” Susman famously wrote. “Every American was to become a performing self.”

Outer charm replaced modesty and inner virtue as a door opener to opportunity. But the reality is much more nuanced and complex than that. Cain says, even the most effective salespeople are unassuming —they learn to read a situation and adapt their behavior to it.

Our internal state of mind drives the quality of our life. When our interpretations of reality are inaccurate we try to fit reality into our worldview. Our state of mind is a reflection of where we are in our maturation process. Controlling what we can control, which is our erratic mind, sets us on the path to a calmer existence.

Most of us are at the point of maturation driven by the process of evolution. This is the chain of dependencies psychologist and professor Toru Sato describes in The Ever-Transcending Spirit. He says internal conflict is the root of our unhappiness.

“When we are paying attention to others,” he says, “we are giving energy.” Sato goes on to explain that the giving and receiving is part of what we try to figure out as we develop relationships. Some people are bothered by this stealing of energy, others aren't.

The reason why, says Sato, is that the giving and receiving is more a matter of perception than reality. Using what he calls “the internal conflict model,” he says:

When things are going our way, we are comfortable. When things do not go the way we want to, we feel discomfort. All of this has to do with what we desire (or need) and what has, is, or could happen. When what we desire (or need) matches what has, is, or could happen, we feel comfortable. When what we desire (or need) does not match what has, is, or could happen, we feel anxiety or some sort of discomfort.

We act to make what we want and what we think could happen match. When that doesn't happen, we repress or deny it to manage our anxiety or do our best to make our desires come true.

There is another option, says Sato:

The other way to manage anxiety is to do exactly the opposite. We can make what has, is, or could happen win over our desires. We can let go of our desires and just accept what has happened, what is happening, or what could happen without any resistance. Although this may be difficult to do in many circumstances, it may be more adaptive in some situations than trying to take control. We all know that being overly controlling can sometimes cause problems. Sometimes letting things (i.e., our desires) go is a much easier way to deal with our internal conflict than to take control.

Learning and growth is a constant process of rebuilding our self-system

Advance in our maturation process is highly dependent on our ability and willingness to break down and rebuild our self-system, which is the understanding we cultivate in our minds. It contains an elaborate program that says, “The world works like this and I can do this and this to maintain my energy.”

Our self-system guides our experiences and is also informed and changed by them. Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught us via Plato that “everything changes and nothing stands still,” and thus “you could not step twice into the same river.” Everything we experience in life is new.

Which means we are constantly in need of creating new understanding to make sense of what we are experiencing. This is why “learning and growth is a constant process of rebuilding our self-system.” Says Sato:

More specifically, as Jean Piaget (1973) noted, learning and growth involves two processes.

One of these processes is known as assimilation. Some experiences are very similar to a previous experience we had. When this happens we require minimal change in our self-system. We only need to widen the applicability of the understanding that we already had.

[...]

The other process is called accommodation. If a new experience is very different from any previous experience, we break down and reconfigure the self-system so that it incorporates and understanding of the new experience in addition to all previous experiences.

We process new experiences using a combination of both assimilation and accommodation along a spectrum, based on its newness to us.

However, if the level of accommodation we need is too high, we may repress or deny the experience, trying to move on as if nothing happened. Traumatic events excluded, this is often the product of fear or laziness on our part. We don't accept the limits of our ability to control those external events and refuse to let them influence us.

When we are able to focus on the present moment better, we are able to accept the new experience and assimilate it. Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius says, “Many of the anxieties that harass you are superfluous… Expand into an ampler region, letting your thought sweep over the entire universe.”

Doing this allows the self-system to grow and develop, says Sato. Each new level of development brings us a certain chaos before we gain stability and then start again with new experiences.

Each time the self-system takes a step in its development, it develops into something that transcends but includes the previous self-system.

Interacting with others engages this process where we both influence and are influenced. If we think of our self-system as our comfort zone, what we are familiar with from past experiences, then we can see why the process of rebuilding it encounters resistance. We arms ourselves to go to battle with change.

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The Ever-Transcending Spirit is a treasure trove of insights on our human nature —why we are the way we are, and its applications to relationships, consciousness, and development.

Along with sincerity, clarity is one of our most valuable traits. When we can convey our thinking and answer questions with brevity and simply, we make it easier for others to understand us. An additional benefit is that we have a chance to stand out in a sea of words and create signal.

The need to be concise and get to the point is greater where complexity meets expertise in one domain. Not only we should care for fact checking and precision, we should also be able to explain things well. In The Unwritten Laws of Engineering W. J. King says, “strive for conciseness and clarity in oral or written reports; be extremely careful of the accuracy of your statements.” He says:

If there is one most irksome encumbrance to promoting urgency in the workplace, it is the person who takes a half-hour of rambling discourse to say what could be said in one sentence of twenty words. Engineers often surround the answer to a simple question with so many preliminaries and commentaries that the answer itself can hardly be discerned; they explain the answer before answering the question.

To be sure, very few questions endure simple answers without qualifications, but the important thing is first to state the essence of the matter as succinctly as possible. There are times when it is important to add the pertinent background to illuminate a simple statement, but try to convey the maximum information in the minimum time.

Many engineers lose the confidence of their superiors and associates by guessing when they do not know the answer to a direct question. A wrong answer is worse than no answer. If you do not know, say so, but also say, “I’ll find out right away.” If you are still not certain, indicate the degree of certainty upon which your answer is based. A reputation for conciseness, clarity, and reliability can be one of your most valuable assets.

W. J. King's advice is to adopt good communication principles like using conversational language and steering clear of technical jargon and slang, being precise, reporting results honestly and objectively, and learning to provide the relative importance of ideas, especially in writing.

We should “cultivate the habit of boiling matters down to their simplest terms.” We develop this skill with experience, and we get there by creating better habits, starting with willpower and metal discipline. He says,

The faculty for reducing apparently complicated situations to their basic, essential elements is a form of wisdom that must usually be derived from experience. But there seems to be marked differences between otherwise comparable individuals in this respect. Some people seem eternally disposed to “muddy the water,” or can “never see the forest for the trees.”

Perhaps one cannot correct this innate tendency simply by taking thought, but it appears to be largely a habit—a habit of withdrawing mentally to a suitable vantage point to survey a mass of facts in their proper perspective, or a habit of becoming immersed and lost in a sea of detail.

Make it a practice to integrate, condense, summarize, and simplify your facts rather than to expand, ramify, complicate, and disintegrate them.

Many meetings, for example, get nowhere after protracted wrangling until somebody finally says, “Well, it all boils down simply to this...,” or “Can’t we agree, however, that the basic point at issue is just this...,” or, “After all, the essential fact remains that....”

The mental discipline to instinctively impel one to the heart of the matter is one of the most valuable qualities of a good executive.

Self-control goes hand in hand with the ability to make good decisions. When we cultivate the habit of making clean-cut decisions, we reinforce our decision-making ability. In Eyes Wide Open, Noreena Hertz, Associate Director for the Centre for International Business at the University of Cambridge says, “the biggest decisions in our lives are often made on the basis of flawed information, weak assumptions, corrupted data, insufficient scrutiny of others, and a lack of self-knowledge.”

In The Unwritten Rules W. J. King provides some guidelines. He says:

This is, of course, a difficult and important part of a manager’s job. Some have a terrific struggle deciding even minor issues, mainly because they never get over being afraid of making mistakes. Normally, facility comes with practice, but it can be hastened by observing a few simple principles:

(1) Decisions will be easier and more frequently correct if you have the essential facts at hand. However, almost any manager can make decisions knowing all of the facts, whereas a good manager will make the same decisions without all the facts. So you might ask yourself: “Am I likely to lose more by giving a snap judgment or by waiting for more information?”

(2) You do not have to be right every time; nobody is.

(3) The very fact that a decision is difficult usually means that the advantages and drawbacks of the alternatives are pretty well balanced. It is likely better, in that case, to decide the matter now than to arrive at the best decision later. So take a position and see it through.

(4) It is futile to try to keep everybody happy. Give everyone a fair hearing, but after all have had their say, dispose of the matter decisively even if someone’s toes are stepped on. Otherwise, everyone will be dissatisfied, and many may accuse you of straddling the issues.

The following questions are helpful in choosing a course of action when the factors are indecisive:

• Does it expedite and forward the undertaking, or does it only produce procrastination and delay?

• Is it fair and square and aboveboard?

• Is it in line with established custom, precedence, or policy? A good reason is generally required for a departure.

• Is it in line with a previous decision or understanding? Even a good reason for a change might not offset the unfortunate impression of instability.

• Can we accept the risk? How does the penalty compare with the gain for each of the choices?

• Are there suitable future alternatives or corrective actions if a decision turns out to be misguided?

Research psychologist Gary Klein, a pioneer in naturalistic decision making, has observed indecision in leaders and managers. “They are afraid of making decisions, and so they hope that the situation will magically become clear,” he says. “And sometimes that happens, which rewards their procrastination. More often, it doesn’t happen, and they have missed windows of opportunity while chewing up time and energy.”

Clarity in communication is often a reflection of clarity of thought, which allows us to make better decisions about the relative importance of data and information. Biases distort our thinking, but they can also be useful, says Klein. However, to counter them, we should keep refining our decisions based on evidence.

In Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making, Klein explains how the conventional wisdom about decision making can get us into trouble. Because we often rely on what we think is reasonable, when often we are called to make decisions under unreasonable conditions. The core of his message is that experience can't be replaced by rules, procedures, or analytical methods.

Our world, he says, is complex and unpredictable:

The claims work best in well-ordered situations. Well-ordered domains are structured and stable. We know what causes the effects we want to achieve. We can think systematically about well-ordered domains because we know how they work. We can calculate what decisions to make and how to predict the future.

However, we don't usually live in that world of clarity. Much of the time we find ourselves in a different world-a world of shadows where we don't know all the causes or how they work, we can't pin down all the knowledge we need in order to be successful, and we aren't sure we understand the goals.

For example, if our problem is information overload, delaying a decision to gather more information is not going to help. We should learn to distinguish between things. For example, puzzles have a known or knowable solution, while mysteries often involve ambiguous and conflicting information. For the first we can develop rules, for the second we develop our abilities to deal with them.

A policeman sees a drunk staring at the ground beneath a streetlight. “What are you doing?” the cop asks.

“Looking for my keys.” says the drunk. “I dropped them in the dark alley over there.”

“Then why are you over here?” asks the policeman, confused.

“Because the light’s so much better over here.”

The streetlights are our controlled environments where we look for answers —labs, classrooms, fixed timetables, and clear metrics. But things are more fluid in the real world. For that we need to rely more on tacit knowledge from our experience.

W. J. King's rule of thumb for decisions is to learn to navigate the line between analysis-paralysis, and evaluating the consequences as best we can. He says, “make clear-cut, swift decisions, but only if a mistake won’t create wreckage for you and your organization.”

The Unwritten Rules was first published in 1944 as three articles in Mechanical Engineering magazine. It has been in print as a book ever since, becoming a classic of engineering literature.

We create our own reality through our decisions. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves,” says Viktor Frankl. We are responsible for how we respond to problems and for the meaning we derive from things.

And we are not alone, we're in this together.

We share the experience of inhabiting our world with so many others. But we forget as we go about our days. Sometimes intentionally, often without a thought, we separate ourselves. Perhaps in our desire to be heard, or to be seen we overlook the power of listening and seeing for ourselves.

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Our relationship with time is complicated in more than one way. We live by the clock. Yet, I'd wager that most of us would love not to have it that way.

Witness our holidays, which likely involve looking at a watch, or a phone, as little as possible. There is a reason why we feel so much better when that happens —we stop caring about knowing what time it is or how long it takes to do something and we just enjoy the experience.

The very idea and expression of time is fascinating. In Metaphors We Live By Berkeley linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon say, “time in English is structured in terms of the time is a moving object metaphor, with the future moving toward us.”

For example:

The time will come when...

The time has long since gone when...

The time for action has arrived.

When we say, “time flies” we are thinking of time in terms of this metaphor. We perceive time in terms of a front and back orientation, with the future ahead of us, or moving toward us. But there is another way in which we think about time, and that is with it stationary, and us moving through it.

For example:

As we go through the years...

As we go further into the 1980s...

We're approaching the end of the year.

“Time is money,” says Benjamin Franklin in an essay containing advice to a young tradesman in 1748:

Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, it ought not to be reckoned the only expence; he hath really spent or thrown away five shillings besides.

Smart or not, clocks and watches are everywhere. But for most of our existence, we woke when the sun came up, ate when we felt hungry, and went to sleep when the sun went down. Something changed in 1957. It was the year the balance spring was invented.

While we used sun dials before, now the movement was mechanical. Suddenly, we could measure time. Which led people to wonder what else we could measure. And we wondered something else. If time could now be broken into small, even pieces, what else could be?

The mechanization of time caused the mechanization of people. With time following us everywhere, it dictates when we eat, when we sleep, and how we measure the speed of things. “Technology doesn't just change the world. It also changes how we perceive it; often in fundamental ways,” says Adam Westbrook.

It happens in every company, eventually the internal dynamics become more important than what happens with the customer, what she wants to talk about, what he's thinking about. In fact, we often (still) prefer the detached rooms of research to a human contact.

We over-engineer feedback because asking eyeball to eyeball, or observing behavior directly would be too simple. Yet there is no substitute for seeing what is going on in context, as situations develop. Which is why we learn the most during a crisis, when we are called to respond, or are forced to act on something.

It happens at conferences as well. Sometimes these seem the modern equivalent of rock band tours —the same groupies going from event to event. While there's nothing wrong with having one long conversation with people we perceive as like-minded, those who live and breathe the same issues for example, in the same environment, this is not exactly what happens.

In Dialogue, the Art of Thinking Together William Isaacs says conversation is the white space, the place where people turn together to deliberate, and weigh out, to suspend judgment (listening without resistance), explore the underlying causes, rules, and assumptions to get to deeper questions and framing of problems, and to generative dialogue that invents unprecedented possibilities and new insights, producing collective flow.

Conversation as dialogue is shared inquiry, which requires us to be completely present as it is happening at (at least) three levels. Its purpose is not to move toward discussion, which reflects the tendency to think alone. In a discussion, people see themselves as separate from each other. Conversation with the right intent, or influence, is about turning together, connecting.

Conversation is the opportunity

You don't get that from commenting alone.

The forward movement in awareness and growth happens when we encounter differing views, different ways of seeing the world —especially when those views are those of paying customers or potential partners for business opportunities.

We should not shy away from looking at the world through their eyes and experience, and consider the challenges, too. It can be uncomfortable, it can get down right frustrating at times. But that's where we can make the most difference.

We should not be afraid to recognize the contributions of many. Rather, we should learn to recognize them, be in conversation with the ideas and the people who carry them forward to take them to the proverbial next level.

Good ideas come from somewhere. We have the ability to build on them as countless writers, scientists, engineers, and managers have done to bring us to where we are.

We need to get out more —of our comfort zone, industry, work environment, circle of acquaintances, way of thinking, etc. find different perspectives to look at problems, and be in conversation with them. In the absence of something to value, we end up selecting from what is available instead of broadening our options.

“When you risk little, you can’t be disappointed if you don’t excel. You are not failing to thrive; you just aren’t trying.”

[Ambassador Samantha Power]

To live fully and leave the world in a better place that we found it, we have to get close to the action. This is the message Ambassador Power gives the Yale class of 2016 after sharing a personal story of how she found her path.

The story is an example in contrasts —over here she's getting by in sports, academic curriculum, and even writing for a local CBS sports affiliate, over on the other side of the world, students in Tiananmen Square standing up for fundamental freedoms. She says:

I share this personal experience with you because when someone is introduced at an event like this one, the bio often implies that they have walked a linear and pre-ordained path to get where they are.

Nobody tells you that your Class Day speaker wrote a remarkably mediocre sports column with a lame name in the college paper that was discontinued. Your class chairs didn’t open up: “Samantha Power spent her freshman year at Yale mailing it in and wondering whether she deserved to be here.”

But everyone has voices in their heads that tell them that everyone else is more capable. I even have a name for the place where those voices live – I call it my Bat Cave. Bats – flying around. Call it what you want, everybody’s got one. A healthy dose of self-doubt is a good thing – it is the sister of humility, which is a great thing. The trick is not letting the voices that live in your Bat Cave hold you back from pursuing your path.

Her realization was that she did not want to live through her time at Yale giving herself alibis for not trying to change at least her little slice of the world. “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough,” says photographer Robert Capa.

That means we need to invest ourselves fully in what we do.

Powers says:

First, getting close means moving beyond approaching an issue through the screen on your laptop or phone, or the filter of someone else’s interpretation, and instead finding a way to get to know the individuals whose lives are impacted.

By hearing people’s experiences first hand – whether the people who live in your buildings if you become an architect, the people who work for you if you run a small business – or a big business, for that matter – or the people who are suffering injustice if you become a full-time advocate – you will see what cannot later be unseen.

Her experience in the field includes the conflict in the Balkans when she decided to move to Bosnia to try to report on the war’s devastating human consequences, when researching American foreign policy she interviewed hundreds of policymakers, and as a diplomat she tries to get out in the field as much as possible to meet people whose lives are affected by U.S. and UN policies.

Getting close also means becoming uncomfortable and seeking the challenge of diverse points of view. She says:

This brings me to my second point: to really get close to an issue, you must seek out ways to see the world and its problems from a radically different perspective from the one that comes naturally to you.

This is hardly a new challenge. For example, a previous Yale Class Day speaker lamented the fact that, “We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” That was John F. Kennedy, in 1962.

But the problem has only become worse.

From the Facebook and Twitter feeds we monitor, to the algorithms that determine the results of our Web searches based on our previous browsing history and location, our major sources of information are increasingly engineered to reflect back to us the world as we already see it.

They give us the comfort of our opinions without the discomfort of thought. So you have to find a way to break out of your echo chambers.

This is tougher than it sounds – especially when it comes to the issues you care most about. But it is in your interest to engage the people you disagree with, rather than shutting them out or shutting them up. Not only because it gives you a chance to challenge their views, and maybe even change them. But also because sometimes they may just be right.

“We may think that being blind makes us safer, when in fact it leaves us crippled, vulnerable, and powerless. But when confront facts and fears, we achieve real power and unleash our capacity for change.”

Almost anyone can learn to

“see better, not just because our brain changes but because we do. As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions: What could I know, should I know, that I don't know? Just what am I missing here?”

We tend to see what we expect to see and it takes effort to get into the habit of questioning what we think we see. When we reach out to others to learn what they see and experience, we gain perspective and a deeper appreciation of the problem. Ambassador Powers says listening is key:

When I started as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN three years ago, I made up my mind that – since I wouldn’t be able to travel to every country in the world, truly getting close – I’d at least try to visit as many ambassadors from the 192 other UN Member States as I could.

I decided that I didn’t want to go into the meetings with a set of “asks,” as I normally do; I just wanted to get to know a little more about the issues that mattered most to them, how they had become diplomats, what books and keepsakes they had brought with them all the way from home, and the art and photos they had chosen to put up on their walls.

So far, I’ve visited the ambassadors of 164 countries.

Getting close also means letting others in and making things visible to them. She says:

Third, if you really want to make change, it’s rarely enough to get close yourself. You also have to bring others close with you – helping them see issues that can otherwise feel far removed or invisible in their daily lives.

We can and should make an effort to show others what we see. We need to be both patient and impatient at the same time to get close. Says Parker:

My fourth and final point is that getting close – and staying close – requires patience and impatience at once. Look at the history of any great rights struggle and you will see that when it moved forward at all, it was always in a two-steps-forward, one-and-a-half steps back fashion. Or as the late great UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello put it, “History is not in a hurry.” So if you are setting out to make a slice of the world better, you must go in knowing that real change often requires a long struggle.

That doesn’t mean being patient in the face of injustice. Because while history may not be in a hurry, you can – and you must – speed it up. Indeed, the struggle to advance basic human rights has almost always been driven by people who refused to accept that any one of us should have to wait until tomorrow for the dignity that every one of us deserves today.

It is because history is not in a hurry that we must always bring a healthy skepticism to claims that the great rights struggles are behind us, and that we have mostly achieved the equality we seek.

To the 669 women in the class of 2016, Ambassador Powers says, “I’m willing to bet that every one of you knows what it feels like to be treated differently because you are a woman.” The biases are so entrenched that sometimes they are difficult to question. Because when we are not close enough to them, it's hard to see them clearly.

Ambassador Samantha Power '92 is permanent representative of the United States to the United Nations and a member of President Obama's Cabinet. She spoke at the Yale College Class Day on Sunday, May 22, 2016 (full video below).

With our pace anywhere from quick to ludicrous, as Mel Brooks would say, we tend to skim the surface of most things and situations. For many, this is a survival mechanism, until it becomes a habit and keeps us from the actual physical experience of living.

Sir Ken Robinson would quip that we use our bodies as transport systems for our heads. Charlie Munger would probably add we think too little, using our heads mostly as calculating apparatus.

We can tell our level of engagement and thinking from the type of questions we ask, including when we need help the most and are afraid, ashamed, and unable to do it. We want others “to see us once beautiful and brave,” as poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote. But he preceded it with “perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting,” which means it is how we respond to the dire situations life throws at us that makes us beautiful and brave, not the problems themselves.

On reading and traveling by foot, which are two ways we connect, we says:

Well, I would say, reading is some kind of essential prerequisite to everything you do. Whether you are a scientist or a filmmaker, or just a normal human being working in a more “normal” profession. I cannot argue much about it. Read, read, read, read, read.

The other side, traveling on foot, nobody does it and what I said will disappear into thin air any moment from now. Traveling on foot has actually given me insight into the world itself. The world reveals itself to one who travel on foot. I can give you one example, you start to understand the heart of men.

I was, for a film, at the Johnson Space Center and had to take to five astronauts who had done a space mission in a space shuttle. I wanted to persuade them to be extras in the film in a very strange way. They were sitting in a semi circle when I was taken in and my heart sank that I didn't know “what should I say? what should I do?” I looked around and looked into their faces and all of a sudden I had the feeling, I understand these people. I understand the heart of these men and these women. I said “ since I was a child, when I learned how to milk a cow with my own hands, I can tell that since I've traveled on foot and in the meadow first you milk a cow to have something to drink. I know by looking at faces, who is able to milk a cow.” I looked at the pilot and said “you sir!” and he burst out in smiles and says “yes, I can milk a cow.”

Somehow when you make films, you understand the heart of men. In a way you cannot learn it, the world has to teach you. The world does it in it's most intense and deepest way when you when you encounter it by traveling on foot.

I'd like to add that when I travel by foot, I don't do it as a backpacker where you take all your household items with you, your tent, your sleeping bag, your cooking utensils. I travel without any luggage and I do not travel, let's say, the specific trail 2000 miles which is marked. I do traveling for very intense quests in my life. I do that on foot.

Reading on a variety of topics, reading from curiosity is important. The other part of it is writing what we think, about our experiences, as a method to process what we learn. On how to focus and connect with an idea and writing, Herzog says:

That's hard to answer, because I do not follow ideas; I stumble into stories, or I stumble into people who all of the sudden, the situation makes it clear that this is so big, I have to make a film. Very often, films come with uninvited guests, I keep saying like burglars in the middle of the night. They're in your kitchen, something is stirring, you wake up at 3 AM and all of the sudden they come wildly swinging at you.

So, I try to —it's not focusing on ideas, but I know exactly what the problem this is. Once you have an idea, it wouldn't help to sit down and keep brooding, brooding, brooding... just live on but keep it in the back of your mind all the time. Keep connecting little bits and pieces that belong to it. Sometimes it's only a word, sometimes half a line of dialogue, sometimes an image that you squiggle down. And when it kind of in this way materializes, then press yourself with urgency.

When I write a screenplay, I write it when I have a whole film in front of my eyes, and it's very easy for me, and I can write very, very fast. It's almost like copying. But of course sometimes I push myself; I read myself into a frenzy of poetry, reading Chinese poets of the 8th and 9th century, reading old Icelandic poetry, reading some of the finest German poets like Hölderlin. All of this has absolutely nothing to do with the idea of my film, but I work myself up into this kind of frenzy of high-caliber language and concepts and beauty.

And then sometimes I push myself by playing music; in my place it would be, for example, a piano concerto, and I play it and I type on my laptop furiously. But all of it is not a real answer, how do you focus on single idea; I think you have to depart sometimes, and keep it all the time alive somehow.

In essence, learn to ask the questions, and then pay attention as you live through life to uncover the answers. It's reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke's letter to a young poet, when we says:

“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

In a metaphorical sense, we are all the young poet who has not had yet the experience of living, who is inundated by the ideology of choice —so many things to do, post, like, share— and unaware that it is the cause of maximum dissipation of our energy.

This dispersion and fragmentation prevents us from maintaining a coherent self. When we reground ourselves, we engage in the process of living into the answers. When we start with a good question, we can write a good invitation to connect, for example. Because we do want to be the person whose emails and messages are worthy of attention and not just feel entitled to it or take it for granted as part of the promise of a frictionless system where personal agency has been smoothed out.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.